Aglaia Konrad
Effort Square

January 16 – February 21, 2004

Andrew Roth is pleased to announce the first one-person exhibition in New York by the Belgian installation artist/photographer Aglaia Konrad.  She will present a multi-media installation entitled “Effort Square.”

Aglaia Konrad approaches photography as an archivist, accumulating images of architectural spaces around the globe.  She is not converned with the immaculate and prevalent architectural photography that revels in the drama of form.  Her anti-aesthetic approach is referred to as “poor” in an essay by Antonio Guzman, published in her recent monograph: Elasticity. He continues: “[her] photography develops no fiction, no allegory, no narrative, and no testimony … neither does it develop in series, line or sequence, nor in diptychs, triptychs or any other narrative combination, much less in single, limited or numbered prints.” Her investigation reaches completion upon presentation in an exhibition space.

Konrad travels and photographs. Many images are shot from helicopters and airplanes. She has photographed in Abu Simbel, Beijing, Brazilia, Brussels, Cairo, Chicago, Dakar, Frankfurt, Linz, Mexico City, New York, Paris, São Paolo, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Often, as in her recent exhibition in Sint-Lukas in Brussels (2001), her installations blend images of varying sizes and medium: silver prints, photocopies, digital scans, C-prints, negative proofs, projected slides, and videos.

In “Effort Square,” Konrad blends together several different bodies of work. The first layer, as it were, consists of three mural-sized, wallpapered black and white photocopies, on top of which is layered 13 over-sized C-prints from Urban Creatures. The final layer of smaller black-and-white images are from Boeing Over. In addition, there will be several slide and video projections. And lastly, Konrad has produced nine photocopy artists’ books.

Aglaia Konrad’s work was previously exhibited in New York in 1998 in “Cities on the Move” at PS1 and in 2002 in “COPY: at Andrew Roth. Her recent monograph Elasticity was published in 2002 by Nai publishers in Rotterdam.